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7 Important steps to successfully build your brand

When you start a business, building your brand is crucial. Once you have your marketing persona and competitor research nailed down, work your way through the checklist below to complete your branding strategy.

1. Develop your brand positioning

Now you know what your competitors are doing, here’s where you look at your USP and why people should choose you, and not them. Write down a few sentences as your positioning statement.

2. Work out your messaging strategy

Look at your marketing persona and work out how your target audience wants to receive your brand positioning and how you are going to present it to them. Address their concerns and provide evidence that you are relevant to your audience.

3. Create a name, logo and tagline

With all the research you’ve done and your brand positioning in place, you should be able to find a name, logo and tagline that represent your company and suit your audience. Get feedback from your audience and use this to adapt your designs and tagline if necessary.

4. Put your marketing strategy in place

Here you might use content marketing, pay per click, paid ads, social media, and offline methods such as brochures and leaflets, depending on your business. You should research what will work best for you – and perhaps consult an expert digital marketing agency.

Be strategic about what you do. Have a plan and think about what results you want to get and how you will know, and measure, when what you are doing is succeeding.

5. Build a website

This really is your shop front on the internet. It’s where you want to drive all your traffic to, where your target market can find out who you are and what you do. It’s the home of all of your valuable and educational free content, which is the best way to persuade customers to buy without them feeling sold to.

Your site should be designed to fit your company brand, and the overall message on your site should reflect your positioning statement.

6. Set up your marketing toolkit

This is where your brochures, newsletters, downloadable content, and the usual marketing pieces come into play. Create those with your brand and positioning statement in mind.

7. Track, tweak and test

Of course there’s no point in doing all of that hard work and then not tracking the results you’re getting. Study your marketing plan and ask yourself if you’ve achieved the goals you set. What metrics are important for you to track and what results are you getting?

Keep on top of your results, test and change when you need to, and you’ll keep pushing forward with a flexible and responsive, brand-focused marketing plan that will grow as your business does.